Awards:
Newdigate Prize for English Verse, Oxford University, 1975; Man Booker
Prize for Fiction for
The Line of Beauty
, 2004.

Sidelights

British novelist Alan Hollinghurst won the prestigious Man Booker Prize
for Fiction in 2004 for his fourth novel,
The Line of Beauty.
Called the first piece of gay fiction ever to win the honor, the story
was also "a sprawling and haunting elegy to the 1980s, "
wrote
Entertainment Weekly
critic Jennifer Reese. Hollinghurst started his writing career as a poet,
but once he began writing fiction his carefully crafted prose earned
scores of exceptional reviews, despite the occasional lurid passage
describing a

sexual encounter. Most literary critics deemed his mastery of the English
language—not the plot pacing or characters—the real star of
his fiction. "Part of the pleasure of Hollinghurst's
writing, " remarked the London
Observer
's Geraldine Bedell, "lies in the tension between the
impeccably modulated prose and the pleasurably filthy things people get up
to."

Born in 1954, Hollinghurst grew up an only child in the Cirencester area
of south-central England, near the picturesque Cotswold Hills. His father
was a bank manager who passed on his devotion to classical music to his
son. After earning his degree from Magdalen College at Oxford University
in 1975, Hollinghurst went on to graduate work there, and was granted an
advanced degree in literature four years later. During his undergraduate
career, he won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry, an Oxford honor
dating back to 1806 and one whose past winners have included Oscar Wilde
and John Ruskin. His first career posts came at Oxford as well, first as a
lecturer in English at Magdalen College; he later taught at Somerville and
Corpus Christi colleges as well. He moved to London in the early 1980s to
take a job as a lecturer in English at the University of London, but was
soon hired by the eminent
Times Literary Supplement
as an assistant editor.

While reviewing dozens of titles for the
Times Literary Supplement
, Hollinghurst continued to write verse on the side, and a collection of
verse,
Confidential Chats with Boys
, appeared in 1982. When he landed a contract with the Faber publishing
house in 1985 for another book of verse, however, he began to suffer from
writer's block, and turned to fiction instead. A friend from his
Oxford days, Andrew Motion—the future Poet Laureate of
Britain— was then serving as the editorial director at Chatto
… Windus, another esteemed London publishing house, and bought
Hollinghurst's first novel.

That debut,
The Swimming-Pool Library
, caused a stir when it appeared in 1988, partly due to its frank sexual
content. Set in London during the summer of 1983, the story centered
around 25-year-old Will Beckwith, an aspiring writer who is also
struggling with his sexual orientation. Though financially supported by a
wealthy grandfather, Beckwith takes a ghostwriting job for a much-older
gay man, Lord Charles Nantwich, to pen his memoirs. Will is stunned to
learn that his retired grandfather, who had been a well-known public
prosecutor, once had Nantwich arrested on spurious charges of what was
then called "male vice, " in a long-ago era when homosexual
acts were subject to criminal prosecution. Yet in Beckwith's own
time, gay men are still the target of some harassment, as he realizes when
a friend is arrested on similar charges.

The Swimming-Pool Library
was set in the early 1980s, just before acquired-immune deficiency
syndrome (AIDS) began to sweep through the gay community. A hedonist
atmosphere threads through the novel, as Will delves further into
London's secretive gay male subculture, but so too does a
countervailing influence: that of Thatcherism, the catchword for a new
political era led by Britain's first female prime minister,
Margaret Thatcher. Elected in 1979, Thatcher and her Conservative Party
colleagues ushered in an era of dramatic change in Britain. With tax cuts
and policies that favored entrepreneurship at the expense of the working
poor, Thatcher's policies roiled Britain, but also helped create a
new middle class.
The Swimming-Pool Library
ends with her Conservative Party's 1983 landslide re-election.

Reviews for Hollinghurst's debut novel were enthusiastic, with
Edmund White of the
Sunday Times
commending Hollinghurst's style, calling it "writing [that]
is enviably supple and sonorously scored. This is not experimental
writing. It is, on the contrary, classic English prose—capacious,
sociable, extraordinarily efficient." White also asserted it was
"surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English
author. How exhilarating to have such a summery book appear during this
winter of deepest discontent." White may have been alluding to
Clause 28, a controversial anti-gay amendment of the 1988 Local Government
Act. Its wording prohibited government funding for any community program
or initiative that was deemed to intentionally promote same-sex
relationships. As Hollinghurst told Charles Kaiser of the
Advocate
many years later,
The Swimming-Pool Library
"was held up as an example of the kind of book that you might no
longer be able to buy for a public library" because of Clause 28,
which ultimately proved unenforceable.

Several years passed before Hollinghurst produced his second novel. In the
interim, he served as the poetry editor at the
Times Literary Supplement.
Finally, in 1994 Chatto … Windus issued
A Folding Star.
Again, it featured a gay male protagonist who is somewhat conflicted
about his sexual identity. Edward Manners seems to have a drinking problem
and a penchant for furtive, anonymous sex in semi-public facilities, both
of which he brings with him to Belgium when he takes a job as a teacher of
English as a second language.

Edward has already fallen in love with one of his teenage students, Luc,
from a photograph he was sent previously, and his crush is the focus of
A Folding Star
's story; a secondary plotline concerns the restoration of a
well-known work of art by the father of another one of Edward's
pupils. The novel is set in the latter half of the 1980s, and this time
the specter of AIDS appears in full—Edward returns to England
briefly for a funeral, and at other points mentions certain pharmaceutical
drugs that stave off the disease's progress. The
Sunday Times
's reviewer, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, found Holling-hurst's
second novel somewhat weakly plotted, but noted that "the strength
of this novel lies not in its events but in the narrative that contains
them. Hollinghurst is agile enough to be able to write equally vividly
about the gradations of colour in a cloudy sky and about the feel of
someone else's tongue in one's mouth."

A Folding Star
was shortlisted for the 1994 Man Booker Prize, but two of the
judges—a panel of four men and a female rabbi—were
reportedly uneasy with the frankly chronicled sex scenes in
Holling-hurst's story. The Booker Prize, as it is more commonly
known, is considered one of the world's most prestigious literary
honors, and has been awarded annually since 1968 to the best
English-language novel written by a writer from one of the British
Commonwealth countries or the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, or
Pakistan. Past winners have included V.S. Naipaul, Iris Murdoch, Salman
Rush-die, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Margaret Atwood.

In 1995, Hollinghurst was finally able to devote himself full time to
writing after he left the
Times Literary Supplement.
He next produced
The Spell
in 1998, which was shortlisted for another leading British honor, the
Guardian
fiction prize. This time, Holling-hurst introduces a quartet of gay men,
led by Alex, an opera-loving civil servant nearing middle age who heads to
the countryside for a weekend vacation with his former lover, Justin. But
Alex falls for Danny, the 22-year-old son of Justin's new partner.
Back in London, Alex falls into a club-hopping, drug-ingesting nightlife
habit with Danny as his guide. Critiquing
The Spell
for the
Independent Sunday
, Mark Bostridge made reference to the title in his assertion that
"the spell cast by the countryside during one long hot summer, and
Hollinghurst's evocation of it, has produced some of his most
exquisite, elegant and deeply felt prose. But at the same time he manages
to hold in the balance the humour of the situations in which his
characters find themselves, and the pain and miserable vulnerability of
their emotional predicaments."

Hollinghurst writes less than 500 words a day, and so six years passed
before he produced his fourth novel,
The Line of Beauty
, which won the Booker Prize for 2004. In a way, the story picks up where
Hollinghurst's debut concluded, at the 1983 reelection of Margaret
Thatcher, and the prime minister is mentioned frequently in the text.
Often referred to as the "PM" or simply "the Lady,
" Thatcher even makes a cameo appearance in the story. This time,
the drama centers around Nick Guest, a proverbial fish out of water who
takes up residence at the posh home of a friend from his Oxford college
days, Toby Fedden, with whom he is secretly in love. The son of an
antiques dealer, Nick is dazzled by the Fedden household in the ritzy
London area of Notting Hill. Toby's father, Gerald, has just been
elected to the House of Commons as part of the 1983 Conservative (Tory)
Party landslide.

In London, Nick finally begins experimenting with same-sex partners after
he places a personal ad. His first lover is a working-class black man, a
civil servant, and the experience transforms him. The next section of the
narrative shifts to 1986, with Nick now conducting a furtive,
cocaine-fueled romance with the son of a Lebanese supermarket millionaire.
Other characters include Toby's mentally unstable sister,
Catherine, and the Fedden mother, Rachel, "a marvelously nuanced
portrait of velvety graciousness lined with steel, " remarked
Anthony Quinn in the
New York Times Book Review.
Quinn commended Hollinghurst for creating female characters that were
more fully drawn than in his earlier works.

Thatcher 's cameo comes during the Feddens'
wedding-anniversary soiree whose preparations including painting the
front-entrance door exactly the right shade of Tory blue. During the
party, Nick stuns the worshipful Conservative acolytes surrounding the
prime minister by asking her to dance. After their spin, he then steals
away with Wani, his playboy boyfriend, for three-way sex in the bathroom
with a member of the catering staff. Wani starts bleeding from the nose,
and the plot shifts precipitously at this point. Nick learns that Leo, his
first lover, is ill with AIDS, and then Wani succumbs, too. The final
third of the story is anchored by the stock market crash in October of
1987, and the Feddens' fortunes begin a rapid decline when Gerald
becomes embroiled in a politically disastrous scandal. It is in this final
section, noted
New York Times
book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, that "Hollinghurst seems to really
find his voice, exchanging the detached, faintly satiric tone of the
earlier parts of the book for a more earnest, heart-felt one. In these
final pages, as shadows of illness, loss, and scandal begin to fall over
the characters' lives,
The Line of Beauty
becomes more than a well-observed portrait of a decade; it becomes an
affecting work of art."

Hollinghurst's Booker Prize win in October of 2004 was an honor as
well as a lucrative gift to any writer, with its $89, 000 prize purse, but
the British press did seem eager to point out that it was the first win by
a "gay" novel. Some of the less reputable tabloids ran
titillating headlines the next day that included "Man's Gay
Day" and "Top Man!" Other newspaper reports noted
that the head of the judging panel was Chris Smith, the first openly gay
man ever elected to Britain's House of Commons. Hollinghurst was
relatively untroubled by the tag, as he told Stephen Moss in a
Guardian
interview. "I only chafe at the 'gay writer' tag if
it's thought to be what is most or only interesting about what
I'm writing, " he asserted. "I want it to be part of
the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other
things as well—history, class, culture. There's all sorts of
stuff going on. It's not just, as you would think if you read the
headlines in the newspapers, about gay sex."